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We sometimes play the blues, too, but we don’t talk about which blues club or which blues tradition we’re “affiliated with.” Who knows? Maybe if ther… - Michael Bérubé
" "We sometimes play the blues, too, but we don’t talk about which blues club or which blues tradition we’re “affiliated with.” Who knows? Maybe if there were fewer academic workers caught up in the mechanisms of disciplinary and institutional snobbery, we could start thinking about what it means to be a member of a musicians’ union or a players’ union. And then maybe, when we got the workplace blues, we could get together and work it on out.
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About Michael Bérubé
Michael Bérubé (born 1961) is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on cultural studies, disability rights, liberal and conservative politics, and debates in higher education.
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Michael Berube
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Additional quotes by Michael Bérubé
Buddhists speak of learning to see the world with “beginner’s mind,” and that’s precisely what you have to do every semester: begin again, from scratch, knowing that anything can happen — seeing those ten, or fifty, or even five hundred students, like the two thousand students you’ve seen before, with beginner’s mind. Our anxiety dreams, surely, are the index of our secret fears of failure and inadequacy. But they’re also the measure of how very difficult it is — and how very exhilarating — to begin each semester with beginner’s mind.
In an important sense, then, the discourse of affiliation is both more and less pernicious than the discourse of professionalism. For the problem with the rhetoric of professionalism, as it pertains to professors of English, is that the conditions of employment in the humanities are not professional enough; we see ourselves as analogous to doctors and attorneys but have no professional apparatus comparable to the AMA or ABA and accordingly far less control over our working conditions.
I’m not suggesting that every aspect of popular culture has the pedagogical potential of Antigone or the Aeneid, and I’m not suggesting that “classic” popular culture can do all of the intellectual work of core courses in Western Civ. The advent of “classic” popular culture means, among other things, that the cultural dreck of your childhood has somehow survived to become the cultural dreck of your children’s childhood. But it also means that popular culture is not necessarily ephemeral after all, and that the saga of Star Wars and the faux funk of KC and the Sunshine Band may in fact unite the past two generations more effectively than any number of Great Books and Western Civ courses. The curious thing about teaching popular culture these days, then, is really this: while so much of it is transitory and ephemeral, so much of it, surprisingly enough, seems to be here to stay.
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